There Is Another Sky
by The Oreo
Summary: The Five Year Mission is celebrating it's one year anniversary when the Enterprise encounters a colony of humans. The only problem? They shouldn't exist.
1. Prologue

Okay so this is my first chapter fic.

Um. Enjoy!

Yes the title comes from the Emily Dickinson poem

* * *

_There is another sky_

_Ever serene and fair,_

_And there is another sunshine,_

_Though it be darkness there..._

* * *

Prologue

Space. The unknown. The void. All of it teeming with brightness of a thousand cities and yet lightyears beyond the reach of one's fingers. The barren darkness contrasted with the light whose every brilliant flicker spoke of possibility. An ocean of wandering stars with storms of vibrant nebulas painted across the sky, and the feeling of both feeling no larger than a grain of sand on an infinite beach and feeling like the cosmos themselves for simply being a part of something so vast. Something improbable, incomprehensible and by every means impossible. The consuming whole that promised both life and death in concert to anyone who dared to pluck its strings. The promise of nothing and forever; darkness and silence.

_I think I'm going to puke._

Doctor McCoy likes the med bay for two reasons: One, because anyone who set foot in here has to do exactly what he says (Jim) and two, there are no windows. Windows meant Space, and Space meant death and he wanted to be as far away from death as possible, unlike some people (Jim), thank you very much. Of course, because the universe has chosen to love him of all people, the moronic, suicidal captain in charge of this mission (Jim) makes sure McCoy is out of the med bay by 0532 every morning. And since this day is the first anniversary of said mission, the captain is dragging his ass down to an alien planet for the party.

Fantastic.

It doesn't matter how many times he's told Jim about the dangers of space, let alone the dangers of alien planets in space, let alone the diseases that could possibly be on those planets; diseases that could possibly be brought on to the Enterprise if some unlucky person were to pick it up, in which case everyone else would pick it up and die a terrible bloody death and never see Earth again.

_James T. Kirk. That lousy, farm-bred, son of a-_

His communicator buzzes right at that moment. It rattles the table slightly and it glints in the light of the room.

"Bones, the landing party leaves in ten minutes."

Speak of the devil.

"Bones, are you there?"

Leonard scoops the device off the medical table and opens it.

"I wish I wasn't."

He can hear Jim's smirk over the comm.

"Oh come on Bones. It'll be an adventure!"

Hadn't he heard that one before?

_5 years in space? Come on Bones, it'll be fun. An adventure!_

_It'll be good for you._

McCoy lodges the communicator between his ear and shoulder so he can finish prepping his med case. He feels no guilt when he picks up a clean hypospray and packs it in next to several vaccinations.

"Oh yeah," He responds, searching for his container of plant based acids, "An adventure, I'm sure of it. Like the Aurora?" _Damn space hippies._

Jim sighs. "Just be there Bones. Kirk out."

Well he doesn't really have a choice does he?

Leonard checks his kit for a final time. The planet is mostly dry, so that means any plant life is scarce, and probably has developed some sort of bizarre, strange, terrifying way to protect itself. Any other life form on that planet will have developed itself around those bizarre, strange, terrifying things and became even more bizarre, strange and terrifying. So besides standard first aid, an extra scanner and tricorders for the landing party, some general vaccines against various venoms would be a smart thing to have, which he does. About 20 of them. But of course, since Kirk is a walking catastrophe waiting to happen, he doubts it will be enough. Though it is enough to fill the case.

_Damn. No room for the extra scanner._

He'd even ordered the plus size medpacs._ Aww, to hell with it._ He doesn't want to reorganize the whole damn thing. He clicks the silver case closed and makes his way to the shuttle hangar, shoving the small device in his pocket.

He would like to think he's prepared, and to some extent he always is, but McCoy knows the universe doesn't like him that much. They were getting weird readings from that planet. Readings that none of them, not even Spock really understood. Though what Spock did say was that it resembled some old transmissions from Earth; that they had some sort of sentient pattern. That meant not only was something alive down there, it might know that the Enterprise was alive out here.

_Why I agree to these things is beyond me._

_We are all going to die out there._

_Damn it, Jim._

* * *

So why AOS and not TOS?

Because AOS is basically the most gigantic canon AU ever made.

_I can do whatever I want._

*puts on sunglasses*

*backflips to where Vulcan used to be*


	2. Chapter 1: Catastrophe Magnets

Hello everyone! Sorry this took a bit longer than expected. I'm aiming to update once a week.

**Also: **Unfortunately only the story is mine.

*cries*

* * *

Catastrophe Magnets

"Damn it, Mal!"

"Wash, now is not the time."

"Then when is the time?" Mal's pilot gives him a pointed look, ginger eyebrows raised high.

Mal sighs, "A time that's...not now."

Something blunt, he suspects a gun, jams into his lower back and he winces. He needs to remind Wash that when one is taken hostage, one is considerate enough not to make too much a fuss so the person holding you hostage is considerate enough not to blow your head to pieces.

The unsavory breaths of the gunman reaches his ears (and nose), "Ya'lls just need to be real quite like, ya hear?" Scruffy, as Mal has deemed him, is well learnt with that gun of his, but not so much with anything else from the looks of it. He would say the same for the rest of the gang, but Mal supposes that's exactly what the magistrate was thinking before they keelhauled the whole planet.

Wash curses under his breath. "Every time I go with you, something like this happens!" Wash hisses, "You're a walking catastrophe...magnet!"

"Oh, I'm the catastrophe magnet? " Mal snaps, "You said you could fix their ships so they could get outta here, so I trusted you to get the job done. Not go all shèn jīng bì- ouch!" He feels a sharp pain as Scruffy hits them both over their heads with the gun.

"I said, quiet."

Mal shakes his head. It was his mistakes to think he could expect anything different from Wash, and he knew Wash expected him to point them out of this mess. He scans around the dusty and dim warehouse. There are quite a few civillian hostages, mostly to keep the Alliance off their backs he thinks.

"Mom..."

A very small sound, like a mouse, echoes across the warehouse.

Mal sees a child, wrapped in a brown blanket, across from him. The boy tugs on his mother's sleeve, which has crumpled around her elbow, pulling her arm down with it.

"Mom, can we go home?"

She smiles, tired, and drops her arm running her hand through his hair, keeping the other one raised.

"We'll see, sweetheart." She looks away, leaving her hand on her son's shoulder, and Mal can see every year of her life on the rim etched into her face. "We'll see."

Mal's stomach feels a bit funny.

He's been feeling a bit off since this morning though. Probably shouldn'ta ate those stale oats Kaylee made.

Serenity doesn't even know they're here; they should still be at the governor's house. And to top it off, Mal's arms are starting to fall asleep from holding them up so long.

The door is thrown open and light flushes into the room. Mal turns away, the light sharp against his eyes. The tin creaks and the wind howls outside as a few more hostages are lead in with the dust and forced to their knees. Mal can hear the scuffle as one of them tries to resist and the _ompf_ that follows it when the handler hits them.

"_Jim_."

"Now I'll take no more lip from ya, kid, unless it be that you're not wantin' them no more." Mal looks back and makes out a young man, in his thirties or forties, glaring hotly at the handler. "One of the services we provide here." The gang member smirks at his joke and kicks the young man in the stomach for good measure. The kid is covered in a mix of dust and bruises, but his hair is exceptionally unmussed and the scarce light bounces off it's highlights. His shirt is a terrible yellow color, though. They must have been aiming for gold and fell somewhere between piss and ôutù, from the look of it. His pals had some weird colors too, though they looked decent enough; deep ocean blue and dark crimson. The shirts also had some sort of silver badge on the right chest.

_Looks an awful lot like a uniform... _They could be the governer's men. If that was the case then things were worse than Mal had thought.

_What's with those guy's ears?_

The door slams shut again and it's hard to see anymore. The commotion follows the light out and all is still again.

This really is a catastrophe.

In the quiet, he hears the gang leaders whispering behind him to his right; near Wash. Mal zeros in on their conversation, hoping to get a bit of information. Though expecting Wash to stay quiet was expecting a Firefly Class 3 to be worth 500 million credits at auction.

"Can't believe this..." Wash murmurs dejectedly, "I just bought this shirt- hey!" Mal hits him with the corner of his raised elbow and flicks his gaze behind them, expecting Wash to understand his meaning. The pilot opens his mouth and is about to start what Mal knows will be a thorough report on the state of his new palm tree print shirt (because the other one with the palm trees got sucked into a shuttle turbine), but closes it when he realizes what Mal was trying to say.

"- big ship, Lonnie. Real big. Like nothin' I ain't seen before."

"You mean it's Alliance?"

"Can't be no other."

An third voice, joins the other two. "Well they ain't tryin'a call us yet. D'ya think they just gonna fire at us?"

"Naw," voice number one drawls, "They won't touch us long as we got them hostages. Bad for their image if any of them get killed, specially the governor."

Mal knew the Alliance cared less about image than the average man might think.

Wash mets Mal's eye and lips at him, _What are we going to do?_

_I don't know yet._ Mal licks his bottom lip, the dust is getting thick and he's wondering how those gang members can even see in here. Maybe if he could tell whether it was fuel or water in those drums it could help him out a bit, but what little light is being let into the warehouse is being blocked by the rope net of supplies hanging right above them.

_Hanging right above them._

Mal turns his head slightly towards Wash, careful not to breath too heavy, "You didn't do anythin' too serious to their ships, did you?"

"No", Wash looks flustered and rolls his eyes, "I just recalibrated their flight computers. Had to shut it down. Course if I would've known what they were doing..." Wash chews on his words for a second, "It should start up again in about a minute."

Mal smirks.

"So when those ships recalibrate, this is what I need you to do."

As soon as they beamed down to this planet there was trouble. Scotty said they would be beamed relatively near where the transmissions were coming from, and if relatively near he meant the center of town then he gets Distinguished Crewman of the Week. If he meant right in the middle of a firefight then he got it for the month. They were disarmed, taken hostage, and thrown into a dirty, grimy storage facility that appeared to only store dust. He's got a busted lip and a tear in his shirt and he's wondering how likely it is that Bones will kill him before their captors do.

So today was going pretty well.

The thing that really unsettles him though is that a species, thousands of lightyears away from Earth, on the far edges of the Klingon Empire, are speaking _English._

So today was going pretty well.

"Captain?"

Jim Kirk smiles. "I believe they said no talking, Mr. Spock."

The Vulcan quirks the usual eyebrow. "Of all the times you have had the opportunity to follow orders, I believe this particular occasion would be the most inopportune one to do so."

Bones lets an agonized breath sigh. "God Damn smart asses."

"As a medical man, doctor, I believe you of all people would know my rear does not posses sentient capabilities."

"When I get my hands on my med kit I swear to God-"

Jim tsks at them both. "Hey, play nice."

He did notice that Bones was more on edge than usual (if that was possible), but Jim_ had _been poisoned only a few days ago and the doctor wasn't taking it lightly. That was an understatement; Bones had brought every anti-venom on the ship with them to compensate. While his life _is _in danger at the moment, he's about 80% sure he's not going to be bitten by something that's "not from hell because the Devil himself doesn't got the stomach to see it." He'll talk to Bones about it later.

The man that lead them in is too busy talking to his friends to notice the commotion they're making, which is weird, considering how enthusiastic he was about keeping Jim quiet. Something big must have come up. He can guess that it's pretty big. Like, Starfleet flagship big. Pulling the bleeding corner of his lip into his mouth, Jim examines the warehouse. Damn it's hard to see in here. There are about two ships in front of them, but "ships" was being gracious. They were hardly big enough to qualify as a shuttle and he's pretty sure one would fall apart before he could even start it up. There were about seven bad guys that he could see, 4 women and 3 men, but there was a good deal of shuffling from the back of the warehouse to indicate otherwise. Various supply cases and cargo were strewn across the warehouse and some more in a rope net above them which he assumed had something to do with survival, though the barrels to his right him smelled like some kind of fuel. They were stacked on their sides and he noted they were being held up by some old ropes and a sort of lever mechanism.

A lever mechanism that could be undone by say, a blast from a phaser or a decent kick.

Other than the hostages around them, Jim noticed there were two men being held separate, closer to the ships: one with brown hair and like eyes, another with light ginger hair and a very festive tropical shirt. They're talking quietly and hurriedly to each other, until a very burly criminal comes and whacks the brown one upside the head. If anything were to very suddenly happen, Jim thinks the two might be their allies.

Jim leans over, hands still above his head. "Spock, did you see where they put our phasers?"

Spock narrows his eyes at the nearest criminal. "Unfortunately, I did not." Jim sees him focus harder, "Though, I believe it would be best to assume that they have either taken the weapons for themselves, due to the superiority of our technology over theirs, or have discarded them for the same reason. But Captain," Spock turns to Kirk, "despite that our attention is required in the present situation-"

"It sure as hell is." Doctor McCoy mutters.

"- I believe that the species's fluency in Earth languages should not be ignored."

"You're probably right," Jim admits, "But yeah, we really need to get out of this mess first, and since we can understand them this time that gives us a leg up."

"Captain, I believe you misunderstood me," Spock continues, "The location of this civilization would imply that any life form found here would be extremely young; so much so, the capabilities of said life form would be primitive, at best, far beneath the concept of language in the slightest. Technically, these planets should not have stable ecosystems at all."

"Most of the species we've come across speak some sort of standard though, don't they?" Bones asks, "Even the Klingons know standard."

"Yes Doctor, I am aware," Spock turns his head away and focuses on the gang leader, "They are speaking in a mixture of what I believe to be both Pre-Atoimc Era English and Chinese, though Lieutenant Uhura would know better. Chinese has not been spoken commonly on Earth since the end of the Eugenics Wars, and casual use of the language has further ceased with the continued mixture of human ethnicities.

"I can conclude only that this species, most likely, originated on Earth."

There's a pause. Spock looks like he's expecting a response, but Jim decides to let Bones handle it.

"Damn it, I'm a doctor not an anthropologist." Bones whispers, "You're saying they're human?"

"Quiet!"

Jim looks up, expecting the a guard to put a foot in his stomach again, but sees Tropicana and Brown Hair both rubbing their heads in pain. Jim looks at Bones, indicating he should be quieter. The doctor rolls his eyes, indicating he understands.

"Bones," Jim whispers, "You still have your scanner, right?"

Bones sighs, "Yeah, it didn't fit in the med kit." He nods in the direction of the vehicles, "Which they took."

"Were something to...happen, all of the sudden, would you be able to get a reading on any of the people here?"

"Happen, captain?" Spock interjects, his lips twitching subtly. Jim has learned this is a smile.

Jim smirks back, "Do you think that we'd be able to use their weapons?"

"From what I can deduce, there are no physiologically specific qualifications required to use them, though captain," Spock always had something to add, "I believe your usual "come out shooting" method, as you put it, would only service our demise. I assume you have an alternate plan?"

"I assume he better if he wants his physical to go smoothly this month."

Jim tastes the dread in his mouth as he thinks of how many reasons he's sure Bones can come up with to give him more vaccines. "The set of barrels over there smell like there's fuel in them. It's being held up by some pretty sorry ass ropes, and if I got the chance could probably dislodge them and raise hell. Then we could get the hostages out and use them to torch the place so they can't get away." Their heads snap up when they hear a small beeping noise coming from one of the ships. The gang must be planning on leaving soon, so they had to act fast. Jim looks back to Spock, "I just need you to give me that chance."

Suddenly, the brown haired man stands up and throws himself backwards into the guard behind him, shoving him into the first craft with a loud metallic thud. He elbows him in the stomach and when the guard tries to shoot, he redirects his arm upwards towards the net above them. The projectile (a bullet?) cuts through a corner of the net and topples mountains of supplies onto two unlucky criminals. Brown Hair then throws the guard over his shoulder and onto the ground, snatching the gun from his hand in the process, running towards the other thugs.

"Or that works too."

* * *

Shèn jīng bì - Basically means crazy

Ôutù - Vomit

So a bit of a long author's note here.

I know I'm bending the time in Firefly by about 100-200 years, but I have a pretty big universe in my head for this and I decided just to roll with it. So before you tell me that, yes I know. Also, the average life span for a human in both Firefly and Star Trek TOS/AOS is 120 years, so that's why I said young man is around 30/40. So Jim is just a little baby in AOS. Awww.

How much I write in this will heavily depend on the response I get. I have 3 fics planned for this arc in my universe I came up with (which has about 14 fics at the moment), but if I don't get a good response in these first few chapters, I'm going to shorten it into one bigger fic (because college help aaaahhhhhhh)

*dies*


	3. This Chapter is Fake I'm so Sorry

Hello everybody!

First off, thank you so much for all your kind reviews! I'm surprised anyone even noticed this story at all.

I'm sorry this is a fake chapter, but I just wanted to let you know that I _will _be updating soon. I go on break in a week or so here, so I plan to get a lot of the story done during the break and then post periodically after that.

Love,

Autumn


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